Since the advent of user-based content sites like YouTube and Facebook, the amount of digital storage dedicated to video has increased at an exponential rate. With 100 million hours of video watched on Facebook alone every day, it has become a necessity for businesses to begin to market through video formats on these platforms. Here are a few ways to optimize your videos for social media.
Attention Span and Optimum Time
For advertisers, an unfortunate consequence of the immediate access to the entertainment the Internet has provided is a decreased attention span for consumers. On laptops, the click off rate is as low as 5 seconds for the average advertisement, and this problem is exacerbated to 3 seconds on mobile devices.
For most advertisers, it would be a mistake to build anticipation slowly in your videos. It is a more intelligent move to backload any interesting information or visuals in the videos as early as possible, so as to grab the attention of viewers immediately. It would be an even more optimised move to make the video itself as short as possible; so as to increase the likelihood viewers will sit through the whole thing.
Vertical and Horizontal Video
An important fact that is often ignored amongst businesses is the distribution of hardware platform used to view social media sites. Roughly 70% of total video views occur on mobile platforms, as such the majority of individuals whom you are advertising to are scrolling through inordinate amounts of information on a miniscule screen. This is an issue for marketers, as the click off rate is even higher for mobile devices than for stationary computers.
One way to mitigate the effect of this is through testing vertical and horizontal video orientation. Data reports from Facebook and Instagram show that a user is more likely to exit from a video if that video’s orientation (i.e. vertical or horizontal) is not what suits its format. Now, different videos operate better with different orientations, so in order to discover which one would be optimum, it would be an intelligent move to test multiple orientations and see what is the most successful (i.e. what garners the most views).
Working With Autoplay
A more recent development in Facebook’s video system is Facebook autoplay; a feature where just loading a page with a video causes it to play, albeit without sound. The operative words in that description are without sound.
Businesses can utilise the Facebook autoplay system by making sure that the video (or at least its beginning) is able to work successfully without sound. I mentioned earlier that the dilemma of shorter attention spans can be countered somewhat by back loading the interesting parts of the video early on. More than this though, it is important that these interesting portions are engaging without the use of audio. A way to ensure this is to place as heavy an emphasis on the visual cues the video makes use of. If dialogue is a necessity for the video, then subtitles or closed captions would be another feature that is more likely to attract interest.
Playing by the algorithm
Social media sites like Facebook employ every tactic possible to increase the time its audience spends on its platform. This philosophy is embedded into its very algorithm, as Facebook values native video over external links. It expresses this bias by limiting the organic reach of linked videos, specifically by preventing them from appearing in a users’ “recommended videos” list.
There is no way to overcome the algorithm of Facebook other than to work within the framework that its creators have made. As such, when posting videos on Facebook (or any social media/user-content driven site) it is important to opt for native video creation. Furthermore, only native videos autoplay in viewers’ feed, whilst linked videos do not.
Engagement with Viewers
This is a technique that is useful unilaterally across all social media platforms. With the immense competition implicit in social media marketing, users require reasons to engage with some media accounts over others. One possible avenue to increase user engagement is creator involvement with their fanbase.
This idea can be explored in a few ways. For one, content-creators can respond to the comments of their Instagram, YouTube or Facebook posts on their site. This is perhaps easier in the incipient stages of development when there are fewer comments, but even in later stages it is still possible. Most social media sites have a ranking system for comment popularity, and an ability to respond to said comments. So when faced with immense popularity, one can delegate their time by responding to the top-rated comments.
This idea can be compounded upon in the video itself. Posters can implore their subscribers in the video to leave comments. Furthermore, comments from earlier videos can be featured in succeeding videos to build incentive to post.
The idea that users can connect with the content creator in any form serves to create more comments on the video. When users believe there is a possibility to be responded to, or featured in some way, they would be more inclined to post comments themselves and possibly share the video. It should be also noted that highly commented videos are preferred by the algorithm of YouTube and Facebook, thus naturally increasing its organic reach.
As with most marketing, video optimisation for social media is a matter of constant and precise experimentation. One’s first attempt in this field is unlikely to yield optimised results. However, with some intelligent planning, giving your videos a competitive edge over others is a possibility well within reach.
